SPH Consistent With Explicit LES

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce a consistent velocity smoothing method for smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). First the locally averaged Navier-Stokes equations are derived in a mathematically rigorous way to demonstrate the "missing" turbulent stress in standard SPH formulations. It is then shown that with a proper choice of velocity smoothing, SPH and large eddy simulation (LES) equivalently solve the same set of filtered equations that require closure approximations. The only difference between SPH and LES, as demonstrated in this paper is the representation of governing equations; for the former the equations are in integro-differential form whereas for the latter they are in differential form. One direct consequence of this equivalence between SPH and LES is that turbulence modeling techniques originally developed for LES can easily be adopted into this version of SPH. Our representation of the sub-grid stress tensor in integral form will provide insight into alternative approaches for dealing with turbulence modeling. Although the use of the Smagorinsky model is the common practice for turbulence modeling in LES, it will be shown that for SPH the most natural choice is to use approximate deconvolution methods. The other particularly fundamental consequence of our choice of velocity smoothing is that the resulting filtered equations are nonconservative in nature and a correct Lagrangian cannot be easily constructed.